YouSaid · the spoken record

Amjad Masad

lines on the record: 124
first: 2026-04-15
most recent: 2026-04-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Like, it's not going to really, at some point, you're like, okay, what do I really want? And that question is actually a lot harder. But if you're starting from zero, Fix your mind or whatever it is a car, success”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. That's right. You have to really, really want it. Here's the RNA of life. At some point, you're going to get to a position where you're like, do I really want it? And that's when you have to grow and change your mind. And that's what I'm saying is scaling past that is a different thing. Like there isn't any material thing that I really want right now. I'm not that liquid of a rich person, right? Like on paper, I've large wealth. I can't buy everything that I want, but I also bought enough things to know that that's not what life is about. And I wish that for everyone. I wish for everyone to get to a point that they find that the material world is just like not all that worth it. I think money is great in so many ways, but you buy a car and you're like, all right, that's cool.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love that. I've been wanting someone to give that if I for a while. It's kind of like this idea that. People say you get what you deserve, but it's really like you get what you want and to find the success you have to. Genuinely want it, and if you don't have it, then you actually don't want”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You become resource rich but time poor. That's like the worst feeling. Like you don't have enough time to do things manually and you have to like delegate a lot. You have to learn how to build a team and hire and do all these different things. Those are all very important. But I think Getting the initial set of success. It's all about Being really good at believing yourself, not quitting, not taking no for an answer. Keep going, keep going, never quit. I think those are really the only necessary ingredients in order to achieve. Enough success. Potentially retire or escape the rat race.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was sorry with intention. Intention and focus and persevere. If you're really intent on finding success, you're going to find success no matter who you are. Like I think if you just like visualize it, you put your mind into it, you have the right mindset, you don't have limiting beliefs, I can meet whoever. Like I can, there's no difference between me and some other billionaire. I can learn all the skills needed. No one is like, we're better than me. Start with these beliefs and you're going to be unstoppable. Think at some point the hard thing. About scaling a company from like a billion dollars to $100 billion to a trillion dollars. Is the game changes fundamentally. And that's what I'm going through right now.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've built a billion dollar company by making tools more accessible to the everyday person. If you could distill everything you've learned, The one piece of advice you would give to make sure anyone listening could find success.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can download Kimi 2.5 on your computer and run it. And you would get a model that is as good as JPD5 when it first came out.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you would suspect that. The top models are at most a few months ahead of what's. Public or accessible. Okay. That's fair. I think a lot of people have suspicions that, oh, they're gatekeeping this technology that's 10 years ahead.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anyone can replicate these things at home. And that's the cool thing about what's happening in the world today. These companies are trying to create enough of a mode around data and computer and things like that in order to block competitors and create more proprietary technology and create an oligopoly around it. But so far they haven't been successful, luckily”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The cool thing about large language models is that It doesn't really matter because It is a very simple process. Being at the frontier is very hard, like creating. Or Opus 4.5, whatever. GPT 2 at some point was the frontier. Now you can train GPT-2 on your phone. So, there isn't enough of a gap that they can create to have proprietary technology. This technology is decentralizing and becoming more accessible really, really quickly in order once. Now we have open source models from China coming out, and maybe there's involvement in the government there, but coming out that are as good as the models that came out three months ago for anthropic and open AI. So, maybe, but it doesn't really matter because once we learn what they've done in the latest generation of things and as compute gets cheaper.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the way, part of the reason why I didn't focus on that is because I think that influence is waning. When I did that interview in 2024, it was at the height of the influence of the effective altruisms. And I think luckily through various things that happened, including Tech people responding to it, their influence is sort of winning, but certainly, I mean, in that interview, I talk at length about. The self serving nature of their thesis and how they use that to manipulate people and to gain all sorts of favors and weird things that happening there. But luckily they're not as important”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or just do better in business. I do cold plunges. I do a cold plunge. It shuts down this constant thinking, talking mind that I have. And suddenly I become. More receptive to inspiration and ideas outside of me. I don't know. I think you can replicate some of that in meditation. Having done that very well, but I find physical shock to my body tends to create stillness. And so cold plunge is one of the big ways you can get it with exercise as well, like exercise to exhaustion to weight. You can't really think a lot. And a lot of people find that. But I think you can replicate in different religious practices and things like that. But for me, like I found that cold plunges forces my mind in a certain way. And I've, and it just like the creates this clarity. And sometimes there's like really exciting ideas that comes out of that. It's all about creating”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Essential to us as humans and what is true discovery and inspiration when you think about the world in purely mechanistic ways. And I doubt that without struggling with these questions that we're going to be able to replicate that into machines and have machines going to go discover new discoveries, they're going to do a lot of amazing things for science like protein folding is an exact kind of problem that you want to direct an AI on. It's a computationally intractable problem. It's really hard for us to solve in many different explicit ways. It is a large data problem, big data problem. And so we're going to use AI to advance science and all sorts of exciting ways. Those original paradigm shifting ideas, I think, are human in a way that is hard to describe. Is there any spiritual practice you do to come up with ideas? Be more creative.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Newtonian physics was a side project. Most of his life was spent in studying religious text and doing things like alchemy and random things like that. Tesla said that all of his ideas came from dreams world. Einstein too. Einstein was like, oh, sitting as chair and like dreaming the whole time. So we kind of lose something about what is”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And because science became an industrial process, it became a bureaucracy. It became government funded. It became all of these different things as opposed to people seeking. True knowledge or original knowledge and trying to seek in all these different ways and arriving at it and all sorts of random and interesting and Mystical ways. Science used to be more spiritual, is what you're saying? Yes. I mean, Pythagoras, correct me if I'm wrong, he basically invented this whole religion of numerology, right? That's probably true. I think Newton spent most of his life.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On prior unstrict prior training, that is a fundamental paradigm shift, a huge jump that comes from somewhere. We don't know where it is. And by the way, All the original scientists in antiquity and history talked about this in spiritual terms. You know, I remember reading Bershan Russell's book about the history of Western philosophy and things like that. And he was talking about pythographers. Pythagoras was running a religious cult. He was not running a mathematics club. And they came up with all these different theories. And if you look at the current state of humanity, we're actually not having that much scientific breakthroughs. And I think counterintuitively, because we've become so mechanistic in our thinking and less spiritual, less open to mystery and mysticism, that degraded the quality of science.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not like a general intelligence that you can drop it like you would drop a human into any sort of environment and they can like learn efficiently. So self-recursive improvement is kind of a fallacy to you like when it comes to things that aren't binary. I think we need to struggle with the question of consciousness because consciousness I think is an important ingredient of generality and how humans reflect on their decisions and their questions. And we come up with these ideas that seemingly come out of nowhere. We call them inspiration, uses whatever people call them. It's like, oh, suddenly I'm struck by this idea like Eureka, right? And we don't know how it works in order to build it into machines. All of science come, a lot of the scientific, big scientific discoveries come from these eureka moments. That is not based”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Requires reasoning through the problems, not based on prior material. AI right now is not doing very well at. And AI companies are having to buy more and more proprietary data to get better at these things. So the way the training models is they'll buy, you know, they'll go into an industry, oh, let's target accounting. We're going to go buy all the data that exists out there. We're going to scrape all the data that exists out there. We're going to buy all the data. We're also going to get accountants in Africa that are going to sit down all day and they're going to do spreadsheets and they're going to like talk over how they're doing spreadsheets. And they did that in coding as well. And they're targeting biotech, counting, science, everything in order to do that. And that's a very repeatable process. And you can create AIs that are very good at doing jobs that people are currently doing.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It will struggle to give you a reasonable output and you end up in hallucination, you end up with all sorts of problems. The reason AI has really got a coding because coding has a binary outcome. It's either true or false. Anything that is soft, more”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think about how machine learning models are trained. Right now, machine learning models are trained by consuming Super large corpus of content, essentially all of content on the internet. And then simulating, creating algorithms so they would learn by creating internal algorithms. Essentially, that's a good way to understand machine learning. To simulate how human might respond to a query. Can go really far with that. It's like amazing that it works. If you give a query to an AI for something, it doesn't have an algorithm for, it will fail at it. And there's a bunch of research showing that it's called like ado distribution queries or contacts. So, you know, if a machine learning model is not trained on certain language or flavor of math or something like that”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there is a sense in which Intentions matter, and you can get into a self-fulfilling theories of the world, right? And we've seen that throughout history, predicting doom and bringing about crisis happens a lot. And so I think it is important to be optimistic. And I think if you have like a doom or mindset and It is dangerous for that reason, for sure. And so I do think people who are naturally depressed and not very optimistic do kind of gravitate towards a more doomer mindset.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I can talk about all the different, I can have a technical debate about AI as well, but just like at rock bottom, I feel like there's something special about humans. There's something about the mystery of the world that we haven't really figured out.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One day he's like, you know, I owe you, man. It's really cool. Have you been able to help me get back into the startup game? What can I do for you? I'm like, you know, you were on Tucker the other day invited you on the show. I would love to meet him. And then he made that connection and we got on a call. I have a very similar story with Joe Rogan as well. I got on Joe Rogan's show. So, I mean, I'm kind of digressing a lot, but all I'm saying is that there's like more mystery to life. And I've experienced a fair amount of affecting the world in a very indirect sort of mental way. There's something to that. And like a lot of people just don't struggle with the fact that there's more to life than this like mechanistic physics of it all. So, when you start from this premise,”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You should definitely look up Martha Scrowley. Martin Scrowley is. A farm entrepreneur that went to prison for some financial reasons, but he became very notorious for a few things. One is he bought a Wu Tang album that was won in production. And he become hated because he hoarded that. But also he just was the initial social media troll and got into under everyone's nerves and all of that. But anyways, I used to watch his stream because he would like put out a lot of really cool financial material. We talked about financial literacy and I learned a lot from him. And when he got out of prison one day, he was like quoting a line. It was quoting a replet. And so like I sent him a message. I'm like, hey, like I saw you were quoting a replt. It would be called like I sent him a tweet. So he responded. We got on a phone, whatever. I ended up investing in his new startup. And she just named a few other people in Silicon Valley. And then”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that happened. And like two years ago, I was like Totally different Person, total different industry. So I think it'd be really cool to meet Tucker Carlson. I respect him a lot. I respect how brave and courageous he is and how he can speak his mind and how inspiring is like view of America is and what it could be. And through a series of accidents, I ended up meeting him. Gina Martin Crellley. Farmer”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's like, I'd like you to come meet me. And so I went and met him and he gave me this address. I'm like, where is this? This is not why combinator. I know my Y commentator is my view. And I walked in this place and it was called OpenAI. And next to it was Neuralink. It was like a small Elon fiefdom in the mission in San Francisco when Elon was still involved in OpenAI. So I met Sam there. And when we sat down, he said he had his laptop in front of him and turned around. He's like, read this email. It was an email from Paul Graham. And he says, like, there's the side replet. It's like really cool, something I've thought about for a long time where you can make it really easy to code and host applications. And we should like reach out to them and get them into the YC batch. And we had like try to apply to YC many, many times before. But it had this intention that like, I'm going to be Paul Graham and he's going to know about a replica. We're going to discuss it. He's going to get really excited about it.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whether it was like people intact that are respected, whether it's a program, Mark and Dreesen, I always wanted to meet Paul Graham. I always had this intent of like, I would like imagine the conversation we would have. Paul Gram is the founder of Y Combinator. And he also founded the Site Hacker News. And I was reading that a lot. He wrote a lot about programming and things like that. We respected how he thought. And one morning Obviously, I do things in the world. I don't sit there just visualize. Like you act. One morning in 2017, I get a message from Sam Altman. On Twitter. And it's like, hey, I'm Sam. I run OC, dude. I know who you are. So Sam before OpenAI was running Y Combinator, the premier startup accelerator.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And visualization. Why does that work? Why does visualization work? It does work. A lot of people swear by it. Like if you visualize yourself as successful, I used to visualize the cars that I want to drive. And invariably, I would get those cars some way or another. I would like if I want to meet someone, I would like have this intent about meeting this person. And eventually I will meet them somehow. And it's like random circumstance. Like”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“like nano engineering just like doesn't feel like an accident so there's something about the mystery of life the mystery of creation the mystery of why we're here that i try to struggle with and i think a lot of people in silicon valley a lot of people in tech have this very Dry physicalist view. Like we're automaton, it's input output, and therefore the natural conclusion is that humans are not very special. We're going to build a more intelligent being, that intelligent being is going to be so much more intelligent that it's going to treat us like ants in the same way we treat ants. But no, I think there's something special about humans. And I believe I'll tell you something about my personal life that I think is very interesting. I think a lot of”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of my peers in Silicon Valley have this like very mechanistic view of life. They think of humans as meat robots. And I think fundamentally, I think there's something more than that. There's something spark about consciousness, about humanity that's different and that's special and that life is important. Maybe it's a religious view, but even without a very concrete religious view, you can arrive at the same Answer by just being perceptive, like just looking at the world around you, like, how can How can this all be an accident? Like, just like even through science, like when you look at, you know, I see these videos of like how DNAs work and just like”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Prediction about the future and then bet on that. And then evaluate that over time and continue to figure out. When you hear about a new thing, don't be cynical about it. You hear about a lot of my generation heard about Bitcoin. A lot of them was like, what is this? But if you pay a little bit attention or like, okay, and you understand the system, you understand that this is an alternative asset to cash and like, you know, a lot of people are looking for alternative assets. And so you have some hypothesis about the future. So have some predictions and some beliefs about the future and try to bet behind them. And again, most importantly, build things. I think that's the best way to gain wealth is to build useful things.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't have to understand it that much in depth, but the main lesson is. The economies run on inflation, and the rich don't hold cash, they hold assets. I don't know. I don't really think about money all that much. And I don't say it in a way to brag or anything. It's just like for me, build cool shit and money will come. Like build poor things, hold ownership in those things that you build or invest in important things and products and services that you think are just the future. Try to predict where the future is headed. Be plugged enough to figure out where the future is headed. Like follow the tech news, follow the trends and form a”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Buy stocks you like. I don't know. I don't want to give like too much of financial advice because a lot of it is very, very selective. But the main idea here is assets, like understanding inflation, how inflation works and how the dollars continuously being printed. Really every currency out there is continuously being printed. And if you're optimizing for cash, you're really losing wealth and you're not really building wealth. Wealth is through accumulation of assets. And those assets tend to, there's certain assets that tend to compound. I bought Bitcoin. When I left Facebook to start Replit, I sold my Facebook shares, which I could have held on to them. And though they've done really well. But I bought Bitcoin and put the rest in my company. And so understanding inflation is core. Like go research that and really understand how this.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really? That's it? Okay. I don't know. I do have some money with a money manager that is just trying to maintain wealth. But I also do buy stock. I buy, I invest in startups. I buy stock in the companies that I really like. I bought Tesla a long time ago because I really like the product. It's like the Grug Brain approach to investing is like.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, over the past couple years, the SP has been dominated by a few companies, then they've gone up a lot. Like if you invest in an S&P, what is it? Like 20, 30% in 2025. That's huge. Is it 20 30%? I'm not entirely sure.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Money is money, like cash like dollars are worthless. They are depreciate, fast depreciating assets. Like they depreciate faster than your $1976 Honda Civic, right? Like it's like don't hold cash. Like again, that's why I emphasize equity. It's like assets, like buying assets. Like all the assets go up. Like gold right now is just ripping like a shitcoin. So assets go up. Cash doesn't.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Super helpful. Yeah, the first startup I was at. Had equity. I did the same thing as you. I took a lower salary to try to get as much equity as possible, but I think I fell victim to the sentiment like, oh, bet on yourself. I didn't even pay the strike price to vest my shares. And I looked at it the other day and the company had sold. And I was like, shit, I didn't know how much for, but I If someone gives you the opportunity for equity, it's usually worth it if you think they have a good chance of selling, especially if people are building to sell. It feels like some people are building to sell quickly versus some people are building to sell on a longer time horizon. I do want to ask you, what do billionaires know about money that”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At that point, but so what you want to focus on is building enough equity and up until to the point where you're just like starting to build a family because that's when you're going to have to like settle down a little bit. You're not going to have as much time and so on and so forth. So I would just like to focus on building equity”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I don't know. I've never, like, yeah, I've went out and partied and experienced all of that. And you could do that with not a lot of money back in Jordan, we used to drive to Beirut and go clubbing for 20 bucks, you know. It's like, you can have fun with not that much money. But then there's like a huge dead zone in terms of how much quality of life and how much hedonism or fun if that's what you're interested in up until you get to operational of wealth. Like there isn't that much difference between like a student going out, like some of the best fun you could do just like going out to clubs or traveling or whatever, going to low-income places and having fun there. And then it's not that much better when you're pulling a few hundred grand a year. It's like you're kind of stuck.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have access to cash at some point, like. It's a lot more fun later in life to like. Pulling a six figure salary. Like you're not going to, it's not an exciting life. Think having wealth is a lot more. Just did the Calmness on your nervous system that you've escaped, the rat brace that itself is worth it.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, like figure out a way to invest in your friends and join in their venture. Or if you have a certain skill, let's say you're an influencer and you want to partner with an entrepreneur, try to get equity. You can get a lot of cash for sure, but what are you going to do? You're going to get taxed 50% on that cash. You're going to spend it on Monsense and try to get equity and build that equity up.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then I start a business, got some liquidity from that, started investing in other businesses. By the way, a lot of early repla employees are already rich. A lot of early replait employees already got some liquidity out. We let them sell some shares, some early Repl investors sold some shares as well. If you invested in Replit anywhere at like six million valuation and we were like many order magnesiums more than that right now, you made a lot of money, right? So if you're surrounded by really smart people, you don't have to have the best ideas. You can join their ideas.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But who cares? Like, you know, if you're young and scrappy, like, you know, you just, you can eat anything, you can sleep few hours. You can sleep on the ground. Who cares? You're very resilient when you're in your 20s, early 30s. I think get a little worse after that. You're very resilient. Your job is to build equity. And the best way to build equities to start a business. The second best way to build equities to join a business that someone else are and get equity in it. And then third is if you already have capitals to invest. And build equity that way. And I've done all these different things. I started by joining a startup that was growing fast, got as much equity in it as possible, worked as if I was a founder”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Entrepreneur Entrepreneur. Like My mind said has always been about building wealth as opposed to getting salary. There are a lot of different ways to build wealth, but all of them revolve around ownership as opposed to getting salaries. When I got my first job in the U.S., Working for a Code Academy, a company that sold for half a billion dollars. I told them you can just pay me enough to eat. Just give me as much equity as it can give me. I was paid $70,000 in New York City. You know how painful though? I was living in a studio with other people”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, but I needed to do that in order to get a visa to get here. And so think about your circumstances and think about ways around them. And there's probably ways in which AI could help you get there faster and do things better and realize that if you truly understand how this technology works, if you're up to speed on it, if you can do things better and faster than other people, you have an advantage. And just lean into that.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there are a lot of new builders coming up today, and they're like, I'm going to just make things with Raplet or tools like that. And I'm going to go just a lot faster. I'm going to iterate faster, make better ideas, build better companies and systems. I would re emphasize this virtue of. Laziness Think a lot of what we're taught in school is not worth it, it's not worth our time. And my approach to school was like, how do you get around it? I needed a college education to get to the United States. Otherwise, it would have dropped out. If I was in the US, it would have dropped out. And it's probably a good idea for a lot of people to drop out. And not go to college”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you retired and live happily ever after. That doesn't exist. That does exist for like 20, 30 years post-World War II. And then it's gone. It's not about cheating, it's about figuring out how the system is rigged against you. And how do you actually hack it? How do you get past it? How do you How do you do things in a way that is more native and true to the world the world has headed today? AI is a great tool for that. Just the fact, if you're someone who just understands how these tools work and understand how you have an amazing time advantage, you can do things a lot faster Again, there are a lot of programmers that are still doing programming the old way and they're going very, very slow, and they're going to continue to go very slow until they get obsoleted.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's a mindset here. There's a mindset, first of all, the world was built by people that Much, much smarter than you. And there are a lot of rules. That are accidental, that are there for historical reasons. And your job is to find a path to the future, find the way of doing things that's most aligned where the world is headed. Because the advice your teachers, your parents are going to give you are just not valid anymore. My generation, like millennials, the advice that boomers would give us is that you work hard, you get into good university, you check this box, this other box, you get a job, you buy a house and a car, get a family. That's it, you know, a few years in like 20 years later, you're a millionaire because your house property went up value.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was like, clearly it didn't. It was like, prove it. I'm like, okay. I also built something in my system where you can automatically execute the vulnerabilities. So I get a shell access to the database. I'm like, okay, what do you want us to find? Your password or your salary or how do you want us to, okay, get my password. So with a query, I get his password. And it was some embarrassing password. I forgot what it was right now, but people have all sorts of embarrassing passwords. And his face turned red and he got really angry and he got up, shook my hand, and left. Well, turns out I was like upon this rivalry between the two different deans. So the other dean, like one dean was giving the responsibility to secure the system. The other one wanted to kind of make sure I rehacked the system to.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A bunch of foreign abilities here. And then different dean of engineering was like, you're lying. And I was surprised that he said that. I'm like, why do you think I'm lying? And he's like, because we fixed the system. I was responsible for fixing the system and we fixed the system.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source